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Possible reasons for Nov 21st / 22nd site-wide traffic drop

Sometime between Wednesday Nov 21st and Thursday November 22nd our site www.whatclinic.com experienced a drop in rankings which has resulted in around a 10% drop in our traffic.

There appears to be no sign of either Panda or Penguin refreshes on these dates. We have not received any notifications of a manual penalty or of any other problems in Google Webmaster Tools.

WhatClinic.com is relatively large directory site with over two million pages in the index. Unlike most directories we enrich our data manually (adding prices, descriptions, treatment lists, etc) and with user generated content (reviews, customer service feedback, etc) and typically rank quite well for the keywords we target.

Usually if we see variations in traffic and rankings we can trace the issue back to certain sections of the site (by geography or by vertical market) or to specific types of pages. In this instance the traffic drop and rankings drop appears to be across the board, making us think it is an algorithmic penalty of some sort.

The problem for us now is to try and identify possible reasons for such a penalty.

I will run through a couple of things that have happened recently and it would be great to hear whether you think any of these could be related to the penalty.

1) This week we received a violation report from AdSense about a penis enlargement page on the site. We list medical clinics and treatments and have done for the last 5 years so this came as a bit of a surprise, and could just be a coincidence, but it is suspicious. Could Google suddenly deem our site or content as being not "family friendly" and penalise us?

2) We recently launched a sister site aimed at the Brazilian market, www.whatclinic.com.br. In order to speed up indexing of this site we also host a copy of this site on the main .com site under the /br/ directory. We use rel="canonical" links to point the content on .com.br to their equivalent page on .com/br/ but plan on reversing these canonical links and eventually dropping the whole /br/ section from the .com site. Could something about this setup be seen as dodgy in some respect?

3) Within the last couple of weeks we have found a small number of sites with hidden links to us. They appear to be blogs that have become infected with malware. We are contacting their webmasters and asking them to clean up their sites and preparing to use the disavow links tool. An example can be found here:

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